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War Is Virtual Hell

By Bruce Sterling


The First Company of the 12th Armored Cavalry Regiment prepared for 
virtual battle. 

At the Combined Arms and Tactical Training Center (CATTC) in Fort Knox, 
Ky., the troops prepared to enter SIMNET - a virtual war delivered via 
network links. With the almost Disney-like mimicry typical of SIMNET 
operations, the warriors were briefed in an actual field command-post, 
with folding camp-stools, fly swatters, and stenciled jerry cans. The 
young tankers wore green- and-brown forest camouflage fatigues, black 
combat boots,  and forage caps.

Their command-post canvas tent was pitched inside the giant CATTC barn, 
right in the midst  of silent rows of plastic tank  simulators. 

The Americans listened to a British officer on NATO exchange, Maj. 
Rogers, a two-year veteran of Fort Knox's simulator network. The major 
wore British olive-green, with rolled sleeves and gold-crowned epaulets 
and a Union Jack at the shoulder. He swiftly explained the tactical 
situation with deft scribbles on the plastic overlay covering a large 
topographical map. 

Today's engagement would take place in a digital replica of California's 
Mojave Desert, the bleak, much-mangled terrain that is the heavy-armor 
stomping grounds of the US Army's National Training Center. Thanks to 
the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Defense 
Mapping Agency, and the Army's Topographic Engineering Center, the US 
military's vast Mojave acreage had been replicated virtually. The 
virtual Mojave is now available for daily use even in distant Fort Knox 
(and in an increasing number of other simulation centers around the 
planet). 

The NTC's Mojave was a very harsh terrain, a hell of a place to lose a 
cow or to throw a tank track, and today it was worse yet, because it was 
swarming with the Opposing Forces.

The Threat were on their way in overwhelming numbers. Their assault 
force was four times  larger than the beleaguered Americans, and they 
were blitzkrieging headlong in Soviet T-72 heavy tanks and mechanized 
transports. 

The unlucky One-Twelve Cav were to take their initial stand in the 
ruggedly digitized Mojave hills on a baseline code-named Purple. Their 
orders were to fight in their sector, delaying the advance as best they 
could, while retreating in good order to Baseline Amber, where the 
survivors (if there were any) were to take another stand.

The attacking enemy would advance from west to east. That much was 
already known. But  the exact enemy tactics were obscured by the fog of 
war.

The US company commander, Capt. Van Aken, studied the terrain and 
deployed his meager forces with care. Alpha Platoon to guard the center. 
Bravo Platoon to the north. Charlie Platoon to the south. The command 
post to the rear, near Baseline Amber. And the scouts, in their swift 
but lightly armored Bradleys, to range ahead of Baseline Purple.

The One-Twelve Cav had their orders. They understood their strategy. 
They left the command post for the squat plastic ranks of simulators. 
The Jacuzzis of Death. 

>From the outside, a SIMNET  M1 Abrams tank simulator is clearly  not a 
tank. It looks like an oddly humped gray fiberglass shower-stall. The 
simulator is, in fact, built by Jacuzzi from the same materials as a 
whirlpool bath. Its interior, however, is designed to psycho-logically 
replicate the basic tank experience, and it does. 

Inside, the simulator is the proper shape and size for a tank's crew 
chamber. It makes all the proper sounds: the loud engine whine, the 
ominous rumble of treads, the multi-ton coffee-grinder racket as the 
turret slews, the concussive thud of the main gun firing. It has the 
instruments of a tank, though many of those controls are nonfunctional 
and only painted-on. There are no actual 40-pound high-explosive shells 
inside simulators, though the loader, by design, must still go through 
the physical motions of cramming them into the cannon, with all the 
proper timing, proper footwork, and the proper clanks and thuds. 

A real M1 Abrams battle tank is a nightmarish vehicle. It weighs 70 
tons. It's 26 feet long and 12 feet wide. It carries a 120-millimeter 
cannon that fires rounds that travel a mile-per-second: high-explosive 
shells, or armor-piercing uranium slugs. The M1 tank can climb obstacles 
three feet high with no trouble, cross ditches eight feet wide with 
ease, and roar down roads at 42 mph. It is an extremely lethal and 
frightening machine that can kill anything it can see.

It is also a horrible place in which to die. The Abrams holds four men. 
Three of them (the tank commander, the gunner, and the loader) ride in 
the crew chamber which is about the size of a large bedroom closet. The 
tank commander sits on a swivel-seat with his knees at the upper back of 
the gunner, who is crammed into a tiny ergonomic nook. The loader heaves 
shells into the butt of the 120-millimeter cannon, which juts like a 
dinosaur's rump into the turret cavity. The fourth man, the driver, lies 
on his back in a padded niche much the size and shape of a coffin. He 
steers the tank with a  pivoting pair of black rubber handles from a 
metal post over his belly. He is not inside the turret with the other 
men; instead, he is squirreled away into the bowels of the machine and 
communicates by headset.  Like the commander and the gunner, the 
driver's view of the world comes through "vision blocks," three 
rectangular blocks each the size and shape of a rear-view mirror. 

Almost every visible surface within the chamber is covered with readout 
screens, switches, sensors, gauges, and maintenance monitors. The area 
around the tank commander's tall black stool has  a weirdly shaped black 
joystick,  a targeting scope, and two flat screens with buttons bearing 
cryptic acronyms. These big square buttons are designed to be pressed by 
hands encased in chemical-warfare gauntlets. They're like a lethal 
parody of the child-sized buttons on a My First Sony.

Tanks are, of course, very well-armored vehicles, but there is very 
little on earth that can resist a 120-millimeter uranium slug traveling 
at a mile-per-second. Anything hit by this projectile instantly buckles 
and splatters. Modern tank-to-tank warfare is extremely lethal and the 
exchange of direct fire generally lasts only seconds.

Those seconds are precious, so time spent inside a simulator is not a 
picnic. Simulators are not toys. They are "fun" in some sense, but only 
about as much fun as an actual no-kidding tank. You can drive these 
simulators across cyberspace landscapes, coordinate their tactics, 
advance and retreat, aim their cannon, fire and be fired upon. You can 
smash into obstacles, bog down in mud, fall off cliff edges, and 
experience various kinds of simulated mechanical and engine trouble. You 
can panic, you can screw up, you can make a fool of yourself in front of 
your comrades and your commander. You can directly affect your real-life 
military career through what you do in simulators. And you can be killed 
inside simulators - virtually speaking.

The One-Twelve Cav deployed to their virtual tanks, opened the thick 
plastic doors on their hefty refrigerator-style hinges, took their posts 
at the black plastic seats, and were sealed inside. The drivers were 
also formally encased in their own separate plastic sarcophagi. 

They started their virtual engines. They began exchanging virtual radio 
traffic. They examined their virtual navigation, and squinted at the 
desert-colored polygons in their vision-blocks. From the Ethernet lines 
dangling from metal frames overhead, SIMNET packets began to flow to and 
>from the gloss-black Computer Image Generators, and the SIMNET recording 
angel, the big network machine they called "Radcliff," started to 
monitor the battle.

In another area of the simulator barn, the wily Threat commander brooded 
over his color Macintosh. Capt. Baker, a US Marine tactical instructor 
on loan to Fort Knox, was taking on the entire American force single-
handedly. The Yankee opposition were sealed inside their simulators, 
gazing nervously at the pixelated desert and jockeying for position. But 
Baker could see the entire landscape at a glance. His on-screen map 
showed red roads, yellow badlands, the milling icons of the blue 
Friendlies, and the red lozenges of his own approaching Threat task 
force, rumbling forward west of Baseline Purple. 

Capt. Baker followed Soviet tactical doctrine scrupulously. He gave his 
unmanned, computer-generated tanks and armored vehicles their 
instructions with deft points-drags-and-clicks of his Macintosh mouse. 

His strategy was to spot or create a weakness in the Yankee defenses, 
pour as much of his armor through the chink as possible, then roll at 
blitzkrieg speed to a target deep behind enemy lines: "Objective Kiev."

Capt. Baker coolly sent three groups of digital scouts to certain death. 

In the north, Bravo Platoon was the first to spot the approaching enemy 
scouts. Three Bravo tanks lurched suddenly from ambush and blasted the 
mechanized transports into smoking digital wreckage. The dying 
transports took a posthumous vengeance, though, by calling in an 
artillery bombardment on the Yankee position. Bravo Platoon saw red and 
yellow impacts spike their hillside landscape, and a vicious crump of  
high explosives burst from the Perceptronics audio simulators. 

A second enemy probe tried the center of the American line. Alpha 
Platoon called in a hasty artillery strike of their own against the 
enemy reconnaissance. Unfortunately, the map coordinates were badly 
garbled in the growing excitement. Lethal "friendly fire" now whumped 
and blasted around Alpha Platoon's own scouts. One scout was killed by 
an enemy transport; the other shot dead by friendly tanks as it fled 
into the trigger-happy muzzles of its own backup units.

By now the radio traffic was going wild. Back at the SIMNET  system 
operator's omniscient "Stealth Station," every howl and yelp was 
spooling onto a cheap  K-Mart boombox for later analysis by trainers. 

Under the stress of battle, the American chain of command was 
disintegrating, and the engagement was becoming a wild scrap.

But one Alpha tank survived. He had found a slope of ground in a sharp 
declivity, a sniper's paradise. Inside the simulator, the tank commander 
of Alpha Unit 24 began to lacerate the enemy column, rolling back behind 
the safety of the  virtual ridge, reloading his cannon, then surging up 
again to swiftly nail another victim with his laser target reticule. It 
is a terrible  thing to snipe with a laser-guided  120-mm cannon. Alpha 
24 was methodically tearing the enemy column apart. Within some 30 
seconds four enemy vehicles were reduced to burning hulks. 

The robotic enemy column seemed stunned by Alpha 24's lethal jack-in-
the-box tactic. They milled around in confusion, unable to get a clear 
shot. Then the American artillery kicked in, bracketing the column in 
lethal fire. With their position absolutely untenable, the column 
charged the sniping tank. Alpha 24 killed two more tanks before being 
outflanked and forced to retreat.

Bravo Platoon was standing firm in the north, but it had been outfoxed. 
No one was coming their way. Instead, two more enemy columns suddenly 
appeared in the far south, in Charlie Platoon's turf. Seen through the 
Threat commander's Macintosh map, the jittering red icons resembled 
angry ants. 

Charlie Platoon as a whole was caught unawares. Despite their wire-
guided TOW missiles, Charlie Platoon's Bradley Fighting Vehicles were no 
match for the Threat heavy armor. Charlie Platoon was swiftly 
overwhelmed, howling through the radio network for backup that was too 
slow, and too far away. 

Charlie Platoon's survivors called in air-support as they struggled to 
reach the relative safety of Baseline Amber. In answer, two automatic 
Apache attack helicopters emerged from the blue nothingness of SIMNET's 
cyberspace sky. They fired air-to-surface missiles and swiftly roasted a 
pair of enemy tanks; but the other T-72 tanks potted both the choppers 
on the wing. The Apaches fell in crumpled digital heaps of flaming 
polygons. 

As the engagement proceeded, dead men began to show up in the CATTC 
video classroom. Inside the simulators, their vision blocks had gone 
suddenly blank with the onset of virtual death. Here in CATTC's virtual 
Valhalla, however, a large Electrohome video display unit showed a 
comprehensive overhead map of the entire battlefield. Group by group, 
the dead tank crews filed into the classroom and gazed upon the 
battlefield from a heavenly perspective. 

Slouching in their seats and perching their forage caps on their knees, 
they began to talk. They weren't talking about pixels, polygons, baud-
rates, Ethernet lines, or network architecture. If they'd felt any gosh-
wow respect for these high-tech aspects of their experience, those 
perceptions had clearly vanished early on. They were talking exclusively 
about fields of fire, and fall-back positions, and radio traffic and 
indirect artillery strikes. They weren't discussing "virtual reality" or 
anything akin to it. These soldiers were talking war. 

"Get them, sir," a deceased tanker muttered vengefully as he watched 
Alpha 24's heroic stand in the fake Mojave Hills. Another tanker, from 
the Alpha scout unit, griped bitterly about his death by friendly fire: 
"fratricide." Dying at the hands of his own platoon had been especially 
cruel. It was clear that the real-life lesson of unit coordination had 
sunk in well -  at least for this poor guy.

"It's only SIMNET," another tanker told him at last. "You're not 
bleeding."

They weren't bleeding. That  was undeniable. On the contrary, they'd 
just been killed in combat, yet also had the amazing luxury to learn by 
this experience. The CATTC trainers called off the battle in time for 
lunch; the result was now a foregone conclusion. As Capt. Baker 
explained to his virtual enemies and real-life students, "There'll be 
hot borscht and vodka at Objective Kiev tonight." The dead soldiers, and 
the few pleased survivors, had shakes, fries and burgers from the local 
Burger King. 

 When they returned from their lunch, Maj. Rogers replayed the battle 
for them, hitting the high points with detailed graphics from the big 
machine called Radcliff. Any event can be scrutinized, from any angle of 
vision, at any moment in time that the trainers desired.


Virtual Reality  as a Strategic Asset
*************************************
SIMNET today is a clunky and rapidly aging mid-1980s technology; its 
giant, $100,000 image generators are so large that they bear red 
adhesive labels: "WARNING: RISK OF PERSONAL INJURY FROM RACK TIPPING 
FORWARD." SIMNET still thrives in everyday use at Fort Knox, Fort 
Rucker, Fort Denning and a number of other sites, sometimes linked 
together through long-distance lines, more often not. But better stuff 
is coming: faster, cheaper, more sophisticated, and far better-
connected.

The people at the Institute for Defense Analyses know all this. The 
Institute is a large, brown, campus-like building set in a pleasant 
wooded lot outside the Beltway of Washington, D.C. Its tall brick walls 
are festooned with white security telecameras. White shuttle-vans with 
the IDA logo - an infinity-sign in a triangle with the IDA acronym - 
pull up periodically, disgorging small scholarly groups of tweed-
jacketed military-academic spooks.

I visited the Institute last fall. Groups of Air Force bluesuiters 
ambled periodically into the "Stealth Room." "Stealth technology" cloaks 
observers in digital invisibility, so that they can travel to any point 
inside a simulated  battle. A huge triptych of full-color computer 
screens showed the simulated activity of a certain weapons system I was 
forbidden to identify publicly. The tarpaulin-shrouded chambers within 
the Institute were draped with wrist-thick clusters of black cabling 
leading to Sun workstations, networked Macintoshes, and a variety of 
prototype simulators. Everything hummed. 

Col. Jack A. Thorpe, USAF,  Ph.D., spends a lot of time in the 
Institute. Col. Thorpe is the "Father of Distributed Simulation" and is 
America's foremost advocate of virtual reality as a strategic asset. 

The Colonel wore a civilian  pinstriped suit, an understated maroon tie, 
and polished black wingtips. Col. (or Doctor) Thorpe is a cognitive 
psychologist specializing in training techniques; he is tall and lean 
and bespectacled, with a straight nose, dark hair, and hollow temples, 
and he possesses the vigorous air of a man with a vision and clear ideas 
of how to get there. He is somewhere near his early forties.

Col. Thorpe's highly unusual expertise makes his position in  the 
military hierarchy somewhat anomalous. He is a career Air Force officer 
who nevertheless pioneered virtual reality networks for the US Army. He 
is also the special assistant for simulations at DARPA. He clearly has a 
lot of pull at the Institute for Defense Analyses, his institutional 
home away from home, where DARPA sponsors the IDA Advanced Distributed 
Simulation Laboratory. 

Col. Thorpe also has a number of friends among the computer-networking 
experts  at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, and more 
colleagues yet at the Defense Mapping Agency, and yet more in the 
Topographic Engineering Center, and plenty of eager listeners from all 
over the defense-contracting industry. 

And yet Col. Thorpe's primary role in today's USmilitary is as "Leader 
of Thrust Six" for the Director of Defense Research and Engineering.

Dr. Victor Reis, Col. Thorpe's immediate superior, is Director of 
Defense Research and Engineering. Dr. Reis has a seven-point plan for 
distributing $3 billion worth of defense research in fiscal year 1993. 
The plan involves fairly standard post-Cold War matters such as global 
surveillance, air superiority, precision strikes, and advanced land 
combat. But the sixth point in the Reis plan is "Synthetic 
Environments." 

Col. Thorpe is the premier Defense Department evangelist for synthetic 
environments. His interest in these matters goes back to the late '70s, 
when he was in the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. In those 
days, full-scale Air Force jet simulators cost $40 million each. The 
simulators - odd devices that perch on hydraulic stilts and pitch and 
toss their wannabe-ace occupants like broncos - clearly worked well in 
flight-training, but they were clumsy and they cost far too much, and 
worst of all, they were not connected. 

Col. Thorpe is a connectivity visionary first and foremost.

His reasoning is simple but profound.  An army is not an armed mob of 
heroic individualists. An army is a connected, coordinated, disciplined 
killing force, working systematically in close cooperation to a desired 
end. In any stand-up fight, an army will destroy a mob, even an armed 
and heroic mob, with very little trouble. 

There are two basic problems with isolated simulators. They don't 
connect to other soldiers, and they don't connect to an enemy. They 
might train individual pilots how to fly very well, but they can't train 
squadrons how to fight. They can teach the skill of handling an 
aircraft, but they can't teach combat with your own comrades at hand, 
against an intelligent enemy who can see you and react to what you do. 
Similarly, a single tank simulator might train a single crew to some 
brilliant pitch of mechanical efficiency, but it can't build platoons, 
companies, battalions, or regiments of armor that can work together, 
confront enemies, and conquer the battlefield. Armies win wars, not lone 
heroes. In real wars, Rambos die quick. 

On a higher level of organization, the same logic of coordination and 
networking applies across the individual armed forces. Single branches 
of the American military establishment can no longer play the lone-wolf 
game. Interservice rivalry (though still very real) is officially out of 
fashion in the post-Cold War world of rapid deployment. Maximum speed, 
maximum impact, and minimum American casualties all demand that the 
services be fully coordinated, that all assets be brought into play in a 
smooth and utterly crushing synchrony. Navy ships support land 
offensives, Air Force strikes support mud-slogging Marines. And space-
based satellite intelligence, satellite communications, and satellite 
navigation support everybody. 

That is the core of modern American strategic military doctrine, and 
that is what Col. Thorpe's new project, the Distributed Simulation 
Internet, is meant to accomplish for the military in the realm of 
cyberspace.

DARPA is an old hand at computer networking. The original ARPANET of 
1969 grew up to become today's globe-spanning civilian-based Internet. 
SIMNET was another DARPA war-child, conceived in 1983 and first online 
in May 1986. DARPA invented SIMNET just as it invented the Internet, but 
DARPA spun SIMNET off to the US Army for day-to-day operations. 

DARPA, by its nature, sponsors the cutting edge; the bleeding edge. The 
Distributed Simulation Internet, projected for the turn of the century, 
is to be a creature of another order entirely from SIMNET. Ten thousand 
linked simulators! Entire literal armies online. Global, real-time, 
broadband, fiber-optic, satellite-assisted, military simulation 
networking. Complete coordination, using one common network protocol, 
across all the armed services. Tank crews will see virtual air support 
flitting by. Jet jockeys will watch Marines defend perimeters on the 
pixelated landscape far below. Navy destroyers will steam offshore 
readying virtual cruise missiles... and the omniscient eye of trainers 
will watch it all.

And not just connected, not just simulated. Seamless. "Seamless 
simulation" is probably the weirdest conceptual notion in the arsenal of 
military virtuality. The seams between reality and virtuality will be 
repeatedly and deliberately blurred. Ontology be damned - this is war!

Col. Thorpe emphasizes this concept heavily. And seamless simulation is 
not a blue-sky notion. It's clearly within reach. 

Most of the means of human perception in modern vehicles of war are 
already electronically mediated. In Desert Storm, both air pilots and 
tank crews spent much of their time in combat watching infrared 
targeting scopes. Much the same goes for Patriot missile crews, Aegis 
cruisers, AWACS radar personnel, and so on. War has become a phenomenon 
that America witnesses through screens. 

And it is a simple matter to wire those screens to present any image 
desired. Real tanks can engage simulator crews on real terrain which is 
also simultaneously virtual. Fake threats can show up on real radar 
screens, and real threats on fake screens. While the crews in real 
machines can no longer tell live from Memorex, the simulators themselves 
will move closer to the "scratch and sniff" level of realism. 

Granted, simulators still won't fire real shells. "They know how to load 
shells," Col. Thorpe points out. "That's not what we're trying to teach 
them." What he's trying to teach them, in a word, is networking. The 
wired Army, the wired Navy, the wired Air Force and wired Marines. Wired 
satellites. Wired simulators. All coordinated. All teaching tactical 
teamwork.

A wired Armed Forces will be composed entirely of veterans - highly 
trained veterans of military cyberspace. An army of high-tech masters 
who may never have fired a real shot in real anger, but have 
nevertheless rampaged across entire virtual continents, crushing all 
resistance with fluid teamwork and utterly focused, karate-like strikes. 
This is the concept of virtual reality as a strategic asset. It's the 
reasoning behind SIMNET, the "Mother of All Computer Games." It's modern 
Nintendo training for modern Nintendo war.



The War We Won
**************
The walls inside the Institute for Defense Analyses are hung with 
Kuwaiti topography. In some entirely virtual, yet final and terrible 
sense, the USmilitary now owns Kuwait. The Pentagon has a virtual Kuwait 
on a hard disk - SAKI, the Saudi Arabia-Kuwait-Iraq database. It has the 
country mapped meter by meter, pixel by pixel, in 3-D, with weather 
optional. You can climb into one of Col. Thorpe's tank simulators and 
you can drive across that cyberspace doppleganger voodoo Kuwait 
exchanging gunfire with the polygonal ghosts of Iraqi T-72 tanks.

There was a war in Kuwait recently. They don't call it "Desert Shield-
Desert Storm" at IDA or DARPA. They certainly don't call it  the 
"Persian Gulf War" - that would only irritate the Arab coalition allies 
who insist on calling that tormented body of water the "Arabian Gulf." 
No - they like to call this event "the war in Southwest Asia." 

The US military hasn't forgotten Southeast Asia. To hear them talk, you 
would think that they had discussed very little else for the 16 long 
years between Saigon and Kuwait City. In Southeast Asia the Pentagon 
sent Americans into tunnels below the earth to fight peasant guerrillas 
hand-to-hand with knives and pistols. They sent soldiers sweeping 
through rice paddies in hopes of attracting gunfire from some Viet Cong 
group large enough to be spotted from helicopters. As the situation 
became more hopeless, they sent in more American flesh to be ambushed 
and pierced with punji sticks. The United States lost a major war in 
Southeast Asia. 

However, the US recently won a major war in Southwest Asia. With some 
handy but basically political and cosmetic help from its Coalition 
allies, the US destroyed the fourth-largest land army on the planet in 
four days at a cost of only 148 American dead. Geopolitically, this war 
may have been less significant than Vietnam (with almost everybody in 
the civilized world versus a clear megalomaniac, victory of some sort 
was probably not much in doubt.) Strategically and tactically however, 
Desert Storm was one of the most lopsided and significant military 
victories since Agincourt. And the American military is quite aware of 
this.

"Southwest Asia" may have vanished into the blipverse of cable 
television for much of the American populace, but the US military has a 
very long institutional memory. They will not forget Southwest Asia, and 
all the tasty things that Southwest Asia implies, for a long time to 
come.

Col. Thorpe and his colleagues at DARPA, IDA, and the Army Office of 
Military History have created a special Southwest Asian memento of their 
very own - with the able help of their standard cyberspace civilian 
contractors: Bolt Beranek & Newman and Illusion Engineering. The memento 
is called "The Reconstruction of the Battle of 73 Easting." 

This battle took place at a map line called 73 Easting in the desert of 
southern Iraq. On 26 February 1991, the Eagle, Ghost, and Iron Troops of 
the US 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment attacked the Tawakalna Division of 
the Iraqi Republican Guard. These were untested UStank troops, without 
any previous combat experience, blundering forward in a sandstorm to 
confront entrenched Soviet-made heavy tanks manned by elite veterans of 
an eight-year war. Thanks to the sandstorm, the Americans had no air 
support either; this was a straight-on tank-versus-tank scrap in the 
desert, right out of the Rommel and Patton strategic notebook.

The Americans annihilated the Iraqis in 22 minutes. 

The Battle of 73 Easting has become the single most accurately recorded 
combat engagement in human history. Army historians and simulation 
modelers thoroughly interviewed the American participants, and paced the 
battlefield meter by meter. They came up with a fully interactive, 
network-capable digital replica of the events at 73 Easting, right down 
to the last TOW missile and .50-caliber pockmark. Military historians 
and armchair strategists can now fly over the virtual battlefield in the 
"stealth vehicle," the so-called "SIMNET flying carpet," viewing the 3-D 
virtual landscape from any angle during any moment of the battle. They 
can even change the parameters - give the Iraqis infrared targeting 
scopes, for instance, which they lacked at the time, and which made them 
sitting ducks for high-tech American M1s charging out of blowing sand. 
The whole triumphal blitzkrieg can be pondered over repeatedly (gloated 
over even), in perfect scratch-free digital fidelity. It's the spirit of 
Southwest Asia in a digital nutshell. In terms of American military 
morale, it's like a '90s CD remix of some '60s oldie, rescued from 
warping vinyl and remade closer to the heart's desire. 

Col. Thorpe and his colleagues first demo'd "73 Easting" in late 1991 at 
the Interservice/Industry Training Systems and Education Conference 
(I/ITSEC) #13, the premier convention for the military training, 
simulation, and VR industry. The virtual battle was the hit of the show, 
and it went on to tour the Senate Armed Services Committee, where it 
much impressed Sam Nunn and John Glenn.

"The Reconstruction of the Battle of 73 Easting" is an enormously 
interesting interactive multimedia creation. It is fast and exhilarating 
and full of weird beauty. But even its sleek, polygonal, bloodless 
virtuality is a terrifying thing to witness and to comprehend. It is 
intense and horrific violence at headlong speed, a savage event  of 
grotesque explosive precision and terrible mechanized impacts. The flesh 
of real young men was there inside those flam- ing tank-shaped polygons, 
and that flesh  was burning. 

That is what one knows - but it's not what one sees. What one really 
sees in "73 Easting" is something new and very strange: a complete and 
utter triumph of chilling, analytic, cybernetic rationality over 
chaotic, real-life, human desperation. 

Battles have always been unspeakable events, unknowable and mystical. 
Besides the names of the dead, what we get from past historical battles 
are confused anecdotes, maybe a snapshot or two, impressions pulled from 
a deadly maelstrom that by its very nature could not be documented 
accurately. But DARPA's "Battle of 73 Easting" shows that day is past 
indeed. The omniscient eye of computer surveillance can now dwell on the 
extremes of battle like a CAT scan detailing a tumor in a human skull. 
This is virtual reality as a new way of knowledge: a new and terrible 
kind of transcendent military power. 



A Virtual Military/Industrial Complex?
**************************************
What is it that Col. Thorpe and his colleagues really want? Well, of 
course, they want the unquestioned global military pre-eminence of the 
American superpower. Of course, they want to fulfill their patriotic 
duty in the service of the United States and its national interests. 
They want to win honor and glory in the defense of the American 
republic. Those are givens. Col. Thorpe and his colleagues already work 
to those ends every day. 

What they really want is their own industrial base. 

They want the deliberate extension of the American military-industrial 
complex into the virtual world. They want a wired, digitized, military-
post-industrial complex, reformed and recreated to suit their own terms 
and their own institutional interests. 

They want a pool of contractors and a hefty cadre of trained civilian 
talent that they can draw from at need. They want professional 
Simulation Battle Masters. Simulation system operators. Simulation site 
managers. Logisticians. Software maintenance people. Digital 
cartographers. CAD-CAM designers. Graphic designers. 

And it wouldn't break their hearts if the American entertainment 
industry picked up on their interactive simulation network technology, 
or if some smart civilian started adapting these open-architecture, 
virtual-reality network protocols that the military just developed. The 
cable TV industry, say. Or telephone companies running Distributed 
Simulation on fiber-to-the-curb. Or maybe some far-sighted commercial 
computer-networking service. It's what the military likes to call the 
"purple dragon" angle. Distributed Simulation technology doesn't have to 
stop at tanks and aircraft, you see. Why not simulate something swell 
and nifty for civilian Joe and Jane Sixpack and the kids? Why not purple 
dragons? 

We're talking serious bucks here. It's not the most serious money in a 
superpower's massive military budget, granted - at least not yet, it 
isn't - but it's very damned serious money by the standards of your 
average Silicon Valley multimedia start-up. The defense simulation 
market is about $2.5 billion a year. That's Hollywood-serious and then 
some. Over the next 10 years the Pentagon plans to drop about $370 
billion on electronics R&D. Some of that money will fall to simulation. 
Maybe a lot of it, if the field really takes off.

There are some very heavy operators in the simulation market - and they 
were all at the 14th I/ITSEC in San Antonio, Texas last November.

The gig was sponsored by the National Security Industrial Association - 
a group that basically is the military-industrial complex. I/ITSEC was 
graced by the corporate presence of General Electric, General Dynamics, 
McDonnell Douglas, Rockwell, Hughes, Martin Marietta, and Bolt Beranek & 
Newman. And yes, they were also favored by IBM, Lockheed, Motorola, 
Silicon Graphics, Loral, Grumman, and Evans & Sutherland. And plenty 
more: a whole cloud of hangers-on, suppliers, dealers, niche marketeers, 
and brand-new startups. 

All these nice-suited people were in handsome display booths in a very 
large carpeted hall within hollering distance of the Alamo. The place 
was alive with screens, top-heavy with humming megabytage. General 
Dynamics ran their new tank simulator live, right on the display floor. 
Bolt Beranek & Newman ran a hot new image generator that made mid-1980s 
SIMNET graphics look like Hanna-Barbera. 

They were running demos at every side, and handing out promotional 
videos, and glossy display brochures, and every species of carnivorous 
mega-corporate public relations. They boasted of clinching major sales 
in foreign markets, and of their glowing write-ups in specialized 
industry journals such as Military Simulation & Training ($73/year, 
Britain) and Defense Electronics ($39/year, Englewood, Colo.) and 
National Defense (American Defense Preparedness Assn., $35/year, 
Arlington, Va.). Strange magazines, these. Very strange.

The attendees attended the keynote speeches, and the banquet speeches, 
and the luncheon speeches. And they attended the presentations, and the 
paper sessions, and the six tracks of formal programming. And they 
industriously leafed through their blockbuster, 950-page I/ITSEC #14 
Proceedings. This enormous red-and-white volume, officially "approved 
for public release" by the Department of Defense, was crammed-to-
bursting with scholarly articles such as "Computer-Supported Embedded 
Training Systems for the Strike/Fighter Aircraft of Tomorrow," and 
"Hypermedia: a Solution for Selected Training and Prototyping 
Applications." 

And even "Virtual Training Devices: Illusion or Reality?" Not much 
debate there. Simulators are, of course, both illusion and reality. 
They're not entirely real, but they function just fine. And they pay 
like gangbusters.

These people weren't there for their health. They were there for a 
simple, basic reason. Call it cyberpork. Cyberpork put the slash in 
"Interservice/Industry." It put that handy hyphen into "military-
industrial." Industry wasn't lonely at I/ITSEC. Their patrons were there 
in spades. Military brass - heavy brass, shiny brass. TRADOC, the 
Training and Doctrine Command. STRICOM, the Simulation Training and 
Instrumentation Command. Air Force Training Command. Naval Training 
Systems Center. Naval Air Systems Command. People in crisp uniforms and 
polished shoes, from weapons divisions, and materiel commands, and 
program offices, and from forts and bases and academies and institutes, 
all across the US.

Suppose that you were an ambitious and visionary leader of the post-Cold 
War '90s military establishment, like, say, Col. Jack Thorpe. Or perhaps 
Col. Ed Fitzsimmons of the Defense Modeling and Simulation Office, or 
Lt. Col. James Shiflett from the Information Science and Technology 
Office, or Col. William Hubbard from Army Battle Labs. What are you 
supposed to do with all these people at I/ITSEC? On the face of it, your 
situation doesn't look all that promising. The 40-year Cold War 
military-industrial gravy train has clearly gone off the rails. There's 
gonna be - there's bound to be - some "downsizing" and "restructuring" 
and "conversion" and "transition," and all those other euphemisms for 
extreme and wrenching economic pain to your own suppliers, and your own 
people, and your own colleagues. Not to mention the potential threat to 
your own career. 

Your answer, of course - you being the kind of guy you are - is to seize 
this magnificent opportunity. Wire everyone up! Global, real-time, 
broadband, networked vendors and suppliers! They're hurting now. They're 
worried. They'll go for anything that looks like survival, that looks 
like a hot new market. Seize the day. No more of this time-wasting, 
money-squandering, inter-vendor rivalry with their incompatible 
standards. One standard now. The Distributed Simulation Internet 
Standard.

The Distributed Simulation Internet doesn't even exist yet. It may never 
exist. That's not a problem. What it does have is its own protocol. The 
DSI Protocol will link simulation machines from manufacturers across the 
field and across the planet. 

This virtuality standard emerged from Orlando, Fla., in the early '90s, 
>from the potent nexus of Orlando's Institute for Simulation & Training, 
Orlando's University of Central Florida, Orlando's US Army STRICOM, 
Orlando's Naval Training Systems Center, and the Orlando-based, 400-
strong Standards for the Interoperability of Defense Simulations working 
groups. (One mustn't rule out the possible cultural influence of 
Disneyworld, either.)

They demo'd the new standard on a network link-up at I/ITSEC #14, live. 
They went for the opportunity. They had to rip up some of the Ethernet 
wiring that they'd laid before the show, because it had so many crimp-
failures from the tramping legions of wingtip-shod vendor feet. It got 
hairy for a while there. But they got the demo to run. 

Of course a system crashed. Somebody's system always crashes at any 
multimedia demo. It's like a force of nature. In the case of the DIS 
Interoperability Demo, it was the Mac Quadra 900 running the slide show. 
The sucker iced when its screensaver kicked in, and the sweaty-palmed 
techies from IDA had to re-boot live. They winged it, and got the slides 
up. It looked okay. Most people didn't notice.

The protocol worked just fine. They had a big digitized section of the 
terrain from Fort Hunter-Liggett in California, running live on-screen, 
cunningly combined with an actual long-distance link to an actual wired 
tank in actual Fort Hunter-Liggett. 

"Seamless simulation," live onstage. 

The demo was far from real virtual war. There was some ritual gunfire 
here or there, but this wasn't real combat training. This was a fashion 
show in seam-free camouflage haute-couture. 

Everybody took a formal runway-model turn, up on the big virtual stage. 
With live narration at the mike: "The bogeys are generated by Bolt 
Beranek & Newman." General Dynamics Land Systems Division modeled the 
virtual M1A2 Battle Tank. From their own show-booth, General Electric 
thoughtfully supplied an Abrams tank and an F-16. Hughes proudly 
displayed a robot spy-drone. McDonnell Douglas had a surface-to-air 
missile, and Lockheed demo'd a virtual Patriot battery. Twenty-four 
companies - twenty-five, if you count the guys who supplied the video 
projectors. All of them packed snugly in the DARPA virtual corral.

They had the brass lined-up right at the front, in a row of folding 
chairs. A rear admiral here, a couple of lieutenant generals there; a 
full brace of Cold War veterans, braid and chest ribbons and hats. The 
brass watched the three monster screens with squint-eyed, show-me 
skepticism.

And the brass weren't blown-away, either. The network looked pretty 
good, and it ran without crashing, but they weren't stunned or amazed. 
The brass didn't leave San Antonio raving that they'd just seen the 
future and it worked. They clearly didn't know quite what to make of 
what they  had just seen. One got the impression that they figured this 
virtual-network stuff might turn into something useful someday. Cute 
gimmick. Clever. Worth a look, I guess. Learn something new every day. 
Glad we came down here to I/ITSEC. Lemme know when we can use this to 
invade Normandy.

The brass were on public exhibit themselves, actually. Whether they knew 
it or not, they were legitimizers, stalking horses, Trojan Horses. 
Generals and admirals from a very long-lasting but swiftly vanished era. 
Compared to their tech-crazed subordinates - the Southwest Asian, baby-
boomer, carnivorous cyber-colonels, majors, and captains who are now 
actually running the digitized New World Order American military - the 
Cold War guys looked like a line of stuffed ducks. 


Today Kuwait, Tommorow the World
********************************
There was some interesting stuff backstage at I/ITSEC. There was a big 
rope-handled canvas bag full of the tools of the virtual trade: hex 
crimpers, nut drivers, metric wrenches, soldering wire, cable strippers. 
There were big ugly powerful rock'n'roll amps stenciled PROPERTY OF US 
GOVT INSTITUTE FOR DEFENSE ANALYSES, and big color display monitors 
shimmed up on cardboard, and there were powerstrips and orange extension 
cords and some loose Mac floppies. And there was a handscrawled brag on 
a backstage chalkboard, written by the techies from Orlando: "DIS 
Interoperability Demonstration. Today's feature: DIS. Tomorrow: the 
holodeck!"

The natural question arises: Is this some kind of wacky egghead DARPA 
media hype, or is this a genuine military technology? Can governments 
really exercise national military power - kick ass, kill people - merely 
by using some big amps and some color monitors and some keyboards, and a 
bunch of other namby-pamby sci-fi "holodeck" stuff? 

The answer is yes.

Yes, this technology is lethal. Yes, it is a real strategic asset. 
Military virtual reality is not a toy or a joke. There is a lot of 
vaporware in "virtual reality," but this technology definitely will help 
people kill each other. Virtual reality happens to be very fashionable 
at the moment, with some ritzy pop-cultural overtones, but that is 
accidental. Whether or not VR becomes a major new medium of commercial 
entertainment, or some vital new mode of artistic expression, it still 
will be of enormous use to the military. Thriving civilian VR will 
probably make military VR expand even faster; giving the virtual 
battlefield better and glossier set designs. 

There was a demo at I/ITSEC called "Project 2851." This is a new 
standard for digital terrains, a standard for all American armed forces. 
It will let them share terrain databases on any number of different 
machines.

But there is another aspect to Project 2851. Project 2851 is about the 
virtual reproduction and archiving of the entire planet. Simulator 
technology has reached a point today in which satellite photographs can 
be transformed automatically into 3-D virtual landscapes. These 
landscapes can be stored in databases, then used as highly accurate 
training grounds for tanks, aircraft, helicopters, SEALS, Delta Force 
commandos. 

What does this mean? It means that soon there will be no such thing as 
"unknown territory" for the United States military. In the future - 
soon, very soon - the United States military will know the entire planet 
just like the back of its hand. It will know other countries better than 
those countries know themselves. 

During the Battle of 73 Easting, an American tank regiment came roaring 
out of an Iraqi desert that the Iraqis themselves could not navigate. 
The Iraqis couldn't enter their own desert, because they would have died 
there. But the Americans had satellite navigation units, so the 
Americans knew where they were on our planet's surface right down to the 
yard. 

The Stealth pilots who blew downtown Baghdad into hell-and-gone had 
already  flown those urban landscapes before they ever put their butts 
in the cockpit seat. They knew every ridge, every skyline, every road - 
they'd already seen them on console screens. 

During Desert Storm, some Iraqi soldiers actually surrendered to 
unmanned flying drones. These aircraft are disembodied eyes, disembodied 
screens, network peripherals basically, with a man behind them somewhere 
many miles away. And that man has another screen in front of him, and a 
keyboard at hand, and a wire from that keyboard that can snake through a 
network and open a Vent of Hell.

This is what it all means. Say you are in an army attempting to resist 
the United States. You have big tanks around you, and ferocious 
artillery, and a gun in your hands. And you are on the march. 

Then high-explosive metal begins to rain upon you from a clear sky. 
Everything around you that emits heat, everything around you with an 
engine in it, begins to spontaneously and violently explode. You do not 
see the eyes that see you. You cannot know where the explosives are 
coming from: sky-colored Stealths invisible to radar, offshore naval 
batteries miles away, whip-fast and whip-smart subsonic cruise missiles, 
or rapid-fire rocket batteries on low-flying attack helicopters just 
below your horizon. It doesn't matter which of these weapons is 
destroying your army - you don't know, and you won't be told, either. 
You will just watch your army explode.

Eventually, it will dawn on you that the only reason you, yourself, are 
still alive, still standing there unpierced and unlacerated, is because 
you are being deliberately spared. That is when you will decide to 
surrender. And you will surrender. After you give up, you might come 
within actual physical sight of an American soldier. 

Eventually you will be allowed to go home. To your home town. Where the 
ligaments of your nation's infrastructure have been severed with 
terrible precision. You will have no bridges, no telephones, no power 
plants, no street lights, no traffic lights, no working runways, no 
computer networks, and no defense ministry, of course. You have aroused 
the wrath of the United States. You will be taking ferries in the dark 
for a long time.

This is not the future that I'm describing. Basically, this is the 
present - this is what actually happened to the world's fourth largest 
army, in Southwest Asia. Will the US Government continue to expand the 
course that led us in that direction? After all, we've won the Cold War 
and our domestic economy's hurting rather badly. Will the new Clinton 
Administration follow the DARPA lead? Continue pouring money into the 
gold-plated rathole of ultra-high-tech military-technological advance?

You might judge the likelihood of that by Bill Clinton's statements on 
the campaign trail. "While we will need a smaller military in the post-
Cold War world, we must retain our superior technology, high-quality 
personnel, and strong industrial base." That's what he told National 
Defense magazine, anyhow. 

Clinton and Gore may have little reason for fondness for the Army that 
brought us Vietnam, but they've got plenty in common with their 
generational contemporaries, the cybercolonels. They are calling for a 
"civilian DARPA," but you can bet good money that they won't lose their 
fondness for the military one. Defense Simulation Internet? The White 
House is now in the hands of rabid fiber-optic enthusiasts.

The virtual iron is hot. Want to see a real vision of the virtual 
future? It's a future in which large sections of the American military-
industrial complex have migrated entirely into cyberspace. This is the 
real DARPA Virtual Reality Vision Thing, the plans they allude to with 
quiet determination just after the big multimedia displays. "Simulate 
before you build." They want to make that a basic military principle. 

Not just simulated weapons. Entire simulated defense plants. Factories 
that exist only in digital form, designed and prepared to build weapons 
that don't even exist yet either, and have never existed, and may become 
obsolete and be replaced by better ones, before a nail is ever hammered. 
Nevertheless, these nonexistent weapons will have entire battalions of 
real people who are expert in their use, people who helped design them 
and improve them hands-on, in the fields of virtual war. 

"Simulate before you build" is a daring ax-stroke at the very tap-root 
of the Cold War-era military-industrial complex. It is a potential coup 
that could deliver the whole multi-billion-dollar shebang - lock, stock, 
and barrel - into the hands of the virtuality elite. If it shrinks the 
military by 50 percent or so, so what? Instead of the 1 percent or so of 
the Pentagon budget that they currently control, the simulation 
cybercolonels will own everything, the whole untidy, hopelessly 
bureaucratic, crying-for-improvement mess. No military object will see 
physical existence until it is proven, under their own institutional 
aegis, on the battlefields of cyberspace. They'll be able to shove the 
ungainly Cold War camel through the cold glass eye of the cyberspace 
needle. And God only knows what kind of sleek, morphing beast will 
emerge from the other side.

Does this sound farfetched? Why? If something as delicate and precise as 
virtual surgery is possible (and it is), then why not virtual military 
manufacturing? Sure might solve a lot of pollution problems. And 
military storage problems. All kinds of problems, when you come to think 
about it.

Let's have a speculative look at the 21st-century USA. Amber waves of 
grain and all that. Peaceful place; scarcely resembles a military 
superpower at all. Hardly any missile silos, hardly any tanks, hardly 
any concertina wire. Until the Americans need it. Then the whole 
massive, lethal superpower infrastructure comes unfolding out of 21st-
century cyberspace like some impossible fluid origami trick. The Reserve 
guys from the bowling leagues suddenly reveal themselves to be digitally 
assisted Top Gun veterans from a hundred weekend cyberspace campaigns. 
And they go to some godforsaken place that doesn't possess Virtual 
Reality As A Strategic Asset, and they bracket that army in their 
rangefinder screens, and then they cut it off, and then they kill it. 
Blood and burning flesh splashes the far side of the glass. But it can't 
get through the screen.

Maybe you can believe that idea and all that it implies - "simulate 
before you build." Or maybe you might wax a little more cynical. Maybe 
what we're presented here, under the slick rhetoric of the Paperless 
Office, is yet another staggering stack of old-fashioned Pentagon 
paperwork - a brand new way to make megabuck hammers and toilet seats to 
an entire new set of ridiculous, endless bureaucratic specs. Only this 
time, after all the studies and form-filling, you end up with absolutely 
no tangible product at all! 

Maybe it's just a bizarre Silicon Valley power-play. Every other major 
American industry has got a sucker deep in the military-industrial 
juice. Maybe it's time for the virtual reality, CAD-CAM, multimedia 
crowd to hunker down with the older industries and have some long, life-
giving sips from the taxpayer's bloodstream. Maybe the whole scheme is 
just updated hype - for that same old fat-cat, imperialistic, 
hypertrophied, overfed, gold-plated military bureaucracy... .

Could be. It could go either way, maybe both ways at once - make your 
own decision. One thing's for sure though. The US military today is the 
most potent and lethal gold-plated military bureaucracy of all time. 

You can't fault DARPA for lack of vision. Vision they've definitely got. 
There's one matter, though, which they don't discuss much. That's the 
possibility of a virtuality arms race. 

If military virtuality really works, everyone's gonna want it. 

Now imagine two armies, two strategically assisted, cyberspace-trained, 
post-industrial, panoptic ninja armies, going head-to-head. What on 
earth would that look like? A "conventional" war, a "non-nuclear" war, 
but a true War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, analyzed by 
nanoseconds to the last square micron. 

Who would survive? And what would be left of them? 



copyright ) 1993 Wired magazine


